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Six Reasons You're Not Yet on the Cloud

What does the cloud mean to you? Where is it? What does it
cost? Who owns it? Are we in the cloud now?

Here in halls of NTT DATA Cloud
Services, our cloud strategists answer these types of questions on a daily
basis with clients of all sizes and shapes. The answer is very simple: cloud is
everywhere. Market Research
Media predicts the industry will reach $270 billion by 2020. The cloud has
penetrated most people’s lives for many years—years before the cloud was even
called the cloud. Many companies found themselves at the cutting edge of cloud
services with varying degrees of success. An older
article from CloudTweaks entitled, “Why Cloud Computing Projects May Fail”
illustrated six key reasons as to what caused these failures at around the
height of the hype curve. Remember the hype curve?

Right at about its height, John
Roseblum cited six reasons for cloud projects to fail:

1. Lack
of managing and monitoring applications

2. Lack
of people with skill-set

3. Lack
of scrutinizing vendors

4. Failure
to understand requirements, technology and legacy data

5. Early
adoption

6. Lack
of the holistic approach

All good reasons that stand the
test of time. However, early adoption is no longer an excuse. Cloud is a
maturing market with adoption across all verticals, both in the consumer market
and the enterprise. Everybody’s on the cloud, in one way or another.

So why aren’t you?Through the years, our strategists and
advisors have seen variations of the following six reasons for why some
organizations have not yet embarked on their cloud journey:

1. You’re not listening to your business.

It is commonplace for IT to feel
protective of their business end users, and it is within their right to feel
this way. They are not only responsible for ensuring these users are able to
conduct revenue-generating work streams, but they are held accountable when
they cannot.

One of the most common
occurrences of Shadow IT within a business is in the form of storage. Due to
policy-mandated limits on drive space, mailbox size limits on user email, and
limitations on file sharing capabilities, the savvy business user simply signs
up for Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or uses their existing iCloud drives to
transfer and store important files they use to get their work done.

Space is cheap, and imposing
these limitations causes IT to be seen not as a business enabler, but an
obstacle. This also opens your organization up to risk. These Shadow IT users
may not be aware of all of the terms & conditions of these public cloud
storage services which may inadvertently be giving up ownership of company
propriety data. And if this data is bound by federally mandated regulations, it
could put the entire organization at risk. Don’t encourage these users to go
rogue. Listen to them. Go through a proper IT procurement phase and choose the
right storage by scrutinizing the vendors
and ensure that the solution provided meets compliance.

2. You’re not listening to the market.

Market demands are very simple:
they want it always and they want it now. Solving the problem of high
availability, low latency, and absolutely no downtime is an expensive and
difficult feat without leveraging cloud hosting and cloud solutions.
Traditionally, the solution for higher performance was increasing network
bandwidth to your data center, adding additional nodes to your cluster,
increasing server memory and CPU, and then hoping that the increase in revenue
justifies the drastic increase in capital and operating costs you’ve just taken
on.

Optimize your service and your
costs by leveraging pay-as-you-use consumption models of the Cloud. Cloud-based
platforms hosting your applications (PaaS) offer automated scaling features
that will spin up additional instances, geographically or within a cluster,
increase computing capabilities of each node, and charge only what you use,
when you use it. During off-peak hours for your services, these systems will
start shutting down instances and even go into a virtual “sleep-mode” when the
service isn’t being accessed for some interval of time, saving even more money.
Spend money as you make money. You know your market—give them what they want
without hurting your bottom line.

3. You wrongly
believe that server hosting in the Cloud will cost more.

Beyond what we just discussed in the previous point, there
is more to costs than server cost per hour and bandwidth usage per GB.
Depending on the type of Cloud-based model you consider, there is a Total Cost
of Ownership (TCO) calculation that should be conducted through an internal
assessment of your IT services and budget.

When considering simple IaaS, most of the cost
considerations tend to be transferred from capital to operating costs. You
still need to manage your environment, perform patching and maintenance, and
have a closely monitored governance policy to ensure you aren’t being wasteful
with your virtual infrastructure. Those few dollars and cents per hour can add
up pretty quickly. However, when you perform an IT Services assessment and
audit using an holistic approach on
your environment, there are other costs to be considered that fall into that
TCO. Leveraging Software as a Service (SaaS) allows the same offsetting of
server infrastructure, but what comes with it is no longer having to manage
those instances since that is provided by the vendor. No refresh cycles. No
maintenance or patch releases. No disaster recovery and backups. No staff
required around the clock needed to keep those lights on. Pay per user per
month, and watch TCO drop and the ROI rise. The higher up the
chain you go, for example with BPaaS (Business Process) such as payroll
services, the higher the ROI.

4. You wrongly
believe that Cloud puts your company at much higher risk.

Risk can mean excessive downtime, data and security
breaches, or having to meet compliance measures mandated by a governing body.
In order to meet these requirements, you are required to meet certain criteria
in terms of data center maturity, data at-rest and in-transit encryption
policies, and many other measures depending on the type of data you store, and
in which industry. One of the corner stones of Cloud Computing is the concept
of XaaS, or anything as a service. When you procure a business or technology
function as a service, you are paying a service provider for the use of their
expertise in providing that function and their proven maturity in order to
qualify as reputable vendor in the market. Not every company can be every
thing. One of the greatest freedoms that the Internet has given to so many
business owners is a low barrier of entry in order to operate their business
and compete at a global level. By leveraging cloud solutions and vendors who
provide services with compliance around HIPAA, PCI, or FINRA, you are able to
enter a market and focus your efforts on that core functionality and service
that you provide to your customers. Otherwise do it all yourself and be sure to
pay large organization a lot of money to perform yearly audits on your
environment to ensure that you aren’t already at risk.

5. You wrongly
believe that going to the Cloud is an “all or nothing” proposition.

No sourcing strategy is all or nothing. Whether you are
outsourcing back-office functions such as Finance, HR, or IT, or you are
Cloud-sourcing infrastructure and services to public or private cloud service
providers; whether it’s part of your portfolio, or how particular applications
are deployed, Hybrid solutions are not only common, they typically are the best
of breed solution for many medium-to-large organizations. Refer below to the
RIghtScale report:

We live in a world of many clouds. Develop a strategy around
choosing the ones that work best for you.

6. You REALLY like
your physical servers.

We get it. If your home is your castle, your data center is
your empire. Don’t worry, even though the servers are virtual, they’re all
still there. And think, now you can use that space for the much-needed (and
well-deserved) company entertainment lounge!

The right cloud solution is out
there for you. It isn't just an alternative to hosting or application strategy,
it is a means of improving your service levels, optimizing your risks, and
ultimately optimizing costs with predictable pay-as-you-go pricing models.
Cloud Strategy is Business Strategy. For more information, contact NTT DATA’s
Cloud Services and ask about our Cloud
Defogger® workshops.